Anne Bradstreet

1) This is from The Burning of My House by Anne Bradstreet, a piece of religious poetry written in plain-style and using inversions. In this poem, Bradstreet recollects her epxperience of only being able to watch as her house and everything inside burned down, and how she knows it happened for a reason. During the time of religious revival and Puritan faith takeover in New England, Anne Bradstreet wrote this religon/faith-based poem to inform other on the dangers of materialism as depicted by their faith, in an attempt to "save" her fellow Puritans from falling into the trap of worldly desire. Based off the belief that in relation to the people, God is all-powerful and is pulling all the strings of human life,

Bradstreet speaks of how God burned down her house …show more content…
In the time of the Puritan religous revival, Edward Taylor wrote religious poetry primarily to spread Puritan ideals and influence conversion and devotion to the faith by using sardonic, foreshadowing text. In this specific poem, Taylor compares a spider to Satan, who is drawing humans away with materialistic desires. The humans who stay steadfast in religion are described as wasps by
Taylor, "I saw a pettish wasp Fall foul therein: Whom yet thy whorl pins did not clasp Lest he should fling His sting." His use of conceit in this poem is to convey the message that the people who are wasps will be saved by their faith from Satan, who will be too scared of the wasp's "sting", while the undevoted, tempted humans are like flies and will get caught in Satan's trap and ulatimately face death.
This ties back into Puritan ideas of the time that promoted having no attachment to desire and wordly possessions, since this would cause God to turn his back on the humans and cause them to experience eternal torture in Hell. Another message of the poem is that turning to God is the only way humans can